Here is an essay I wrote about the Pinay body: “To My Unknown Daughter,” which was published in Glimmer Train back in 2014. I thought reading this essay for CA+T’s “Talking Bodies” exhibit was appropriate but also star-aligning, because I wanted to do something more with it, something visual, something multimedia. I decided against using footage of me reading this essay, or any footage of me really, and instead used this vintage, archival footage of my family in Mandaluyong, Metro Manila, Philippines, in 1967, during the Marcos regime. There’s so much lovely irony in this archival, fragmentary footage ... My father's in there with his older brothers; him the youngest, the most hungry. He’s about five years old, such a ripe and innocent age, a persona of my father I’ve never met or seen before, and he is seen riding a bike or longing for his eldest brother, my Uncle Dennis, the chosen patriarch of my family after my grandfather died. The men first seen in the beginning, in the first clip, is my Uncle Geony and my Uncle Eddie—both of whom fled to the East Coast right around the time my grandfather passed, almost in defiance, in irrelevance to my Uncle Dennis. All the kids dancing are my familia—my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my bloodline.

Let me go deeper, and tell you the backstory behind the footage: my white uncle, who filmed this footage, met my Auntie Lodie near Clark Air Base (she was a prostitute), and they married; before he left for America (and subsequently took her, which allowed my whole family to immigrate), he would visit the family home in Manila and bring gifts, like this camera. In this essay, I talk a bit about how this complication, this nuance, this chance meeting between my white uncle and prostitute aunt is a consequence of U.S. Imperialism, and how all of this—this kind of colonial inheritance—affects the ways I write about the Pinay body. Although I wanted to film new material, these archival, old family videos made by my white uncle—who, ironically, is the only one archiving and recording our family histories, our family tree, and salvaging mementos from our past—obsessed me. This footage always damages me in a slow, pregnant way; it marks the infancy of my familia, it marks the moment when we were once together, before we broke apart. I decided to loop the video in hopes of producing a kind of fragmentary remembrance.

 

Here is an essay I wrote about the Pinay body: “To My Unknown Daughter,” which was published in Glimmer Train back in 2014. I thought reading this essay for CA+T’s “Talking Bodies” exhibit was appropriate but also star-aligning, because I wanted to do something more with it, something visual, something multimedia. I decided against using footage of me reading this essay, or any footage of me really, and instead used this vintage, archival footage of my family in Mandaluyong, Metro Manila, Philippines, in 1967, during the Marcos regime. There’s so much lovely irony in this archival, fragmentary footage ... My father's in there with his older brothers; him the youngest, the most hungry. He’s about five years old, such a ripe and innocent age, a persona of my father I’ve never met or seen before, and he is seen riding a bike or longing for his eldest brother, my Uncle Dennis, the chosen patriarch of my family after my grandfather died. The men first seen in the beginning, in the first clip, is my Uncle Geony and my Uncle Eddie—both of whom fled to the East Coast right around the time my grandfather passed, almost in defiance, in irrelevance to my Uncle Dennis. All the kids dancing are my familia—my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my bloodline.

Let me go deeper, and tell you the backstory behind the footage: my white uncle, who filmed this footage, met my Auntie Lodie near Clark Air Base (she was a prostitute), and they married; before he left for America (and subsequently took her, which allowed my whole family to immigrate), he would visit the family home in Manila and bring gifts, like this camera. In this essay, I talk a bit about how this complication, this nuance, this chance meeting between my white uncle and prostitute aunt is a consequence of U.S. Imperialism, and how all of this—this kind of colonial inheritance—affects the ways I write about the Pinay body. Although I wanted to film new material, these archival, old family videos made by my white uncle—who, ironically, is the only one archiving and recording our family histories, our family tree, and salvaging mementos from our past—obsessed me. This footage always damages me in a slow, pregnant way; it marks the infancy of my familia, it marks the moment when we were once together, before we broke apart. I decided to loop the video in hopes of producing a kind of fragmentary remembrance.

 

In the piece Balut, I reflect on my position as someone who was born and raised in Canada but whose parents originated from the Philippines. This work is about my Filipino upbringing conflicting with the Westernized norm that I was confronted with during lunchtime in elementary school. Because Filipino dishes were not recognized as mainstream food, it resulted in my Filipino shame as a child as I would try to assimilate to the culture of the classroom. Balut is a hard-boiled duck fetus egg. In the Philippines it’s a popular delicacy, but in North America it’s a taboo. Balut in Tagalog also translates as “pack up” in English, which goes back to the origins of my Filipino upbringing and family migrating from the Philippines. Mimicking the light box used in harvesting balut eggs, the light inside the bag’s hole turns on only when it’s daytime in the Philippines and turns off when it’s nighttime—a daily reminder of our connection to a homeland that helped raise us, especially through food.

In the piece Balut, I reflect on my position as someone who was born and raised in Canada but whose parents originated from the Philippines. This work is about my Filipino upbringing conflicting with the Westernized norm that I was confronted with during lunchtime in elementary school. Because Filipino dishes were not recognized as mainstream food, it resulted in my Filipino shame as a child as I would try to assimilate to the culture of the classroom. Balut is a hard-boiled duck fetus egg. In the Philippines it’s a popular delicacy, but in North America it’s a taboo. Balut in Tagalog also translates as “pack up” in English, which goes back to the origins of my Filipino upbringing and family migrating from the Philippines. Mimicking the light box used in harvesting balut eggs, the light inside the bag’s hole turns on only when it’s daytime in the Philippines and turns off when it’s nighttime—a daily reminder of our connection to a homeland that helped raise us, especially through food.

In the piece Balut, I reflect on my position as someone who was born and raised in Canada but whose parents originated from the Philippines. This work is about my Filipino upbringing conflicting with the Westernized norm that I was confronted with during lunchtime in elementary school. Because Filipino dishes were not recognized as mainstream food, it resulted in my Filipino shame as a child as I would try to assimilate to the culture of the classroom. Balut is a hard-boiled duck fetus egg. In the Philippines it’s a popular delicacy, but in North America it’s a taboo. Balut in Tagalog also translates as “pack up” in English, which goes back to the origins of my Filipino upbringing and family migrating from the Philippines. Mimicking the light box used in harvesting balut eggs, the light inside the bag’s hole turns on only when it’s daytime in the Philippines and turns off when it’s nighttime—a daily reminder of our connection to a homeland that helped raise us, especially through food.